Letters: Drug problem

In 'Over the edge: stress and schizophrenia' (4 January), Julian Leff displays a not so subtle bias when he writes, 'the relatively poor outcome of patients in the West occurs despite the fact that a high proportion are kept on antipsychotic drugs indefinitely.' A less biased view might be that the poor outcome occurs because they are kept on such drugs. In their 1976 review in the American Journal of Psychiatry entitled 'Maintenance Antipsychotic Therapy: Is the Cure Worse than The Disease?', Gardos and Cole remark that as many as 50 per cent of those on such drugs 'would not be worse off without them'. After reviewing the literature myself I think that a lot more of them would be better off without the inevitable iatrogenic disease caused by such drugs.

M. J. C. Brown Northwood, Middlesex

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